Venture Concept No. 1

Assignment 24A

Opportunity

My opportunity stems from the under-met needs of busy, hardworking individuals. To begin with, pitch involves the creation of a drive-thru grocery store. All of my life, I have wondered if one day someone would come up with a solution to having to do groceries. Many companies have incorporated mobile order and pick-up technology, others have created delivery systems for their services. However, I have yet to see a grocery store that offers a drive-thru option for doing and picking up groceries. As a busy college student who is also a full-time worker and mother, I find myself having a hard time juggling every minute detail in my life. I am an avid believer in cooking at home, so groceries are ideally very important. This being said, grocery shopping is on my chores list once or twice a week, if not more. I have tried mobile order and pick and delivery services, and while I was content with both, I found the delivery service to be expensive, the order pick-up time to be too long. This class has allowed me to explore my idea of a drive-thru grocery store and think about the possible outcomes of it. My customer base is easy to target—people like me. There isn’t a specific age group, or demographic that would benefit more from this. However, families with dual-earning couples with more than two children would get the most use out of this service.

1.     Forces creating this opportunity involve the rapid change in technology and the time requirement that the workforce and children require. Parents are having to juggle chores, their kid’s after school activities, dinner, their own work, and their own hobbies all in one day. Grocery shopping should be the least of their worries.

2.     There is no specific market geographically that would benefit from this service. Perhaps areas with warm weather would find this service more convenient to use if the drive-thru were not created to have overhead protection.

3.     Like mentioned earlier, customers (such as myself) are satisfying this need through online order and pick-up and delivery services. However, a drive-thru options would trump these options easily.

4.     The opportunity has the potential to reach a very large-scale. However, because it is so specific, it may currently appeal to only a small number of people.

Innovation

As mentioned earlier, my service is a drive-thru grocery store. This service can either take its own form as a drive-thru additional service to independent grocery stores, or it can be an entire new concept of its own. I am looking to turn this concept into a concept of its own, and the only drive-thru grocery service that exists. Basically, it is an independent grocery store, with drive-thru lanes and “order boxes” or order machines available so that customers can pull up, choose what items they would like to purchase, and pull up to a separate “window” to have their groceries loaded up for them. The idea behind this is that it will be machine-operated for faster service. A warehouse will be used to stock all the available items, and a robot will be in charge of collecting all items for the customer. The idea behind this is fast service. This is specifically meant for people who need a few items but do not want to go inside to shop for an entire haul. For example, if a mother is on her way home from work and she realizes she’s missing pasta noodles for tonight’s dinner, then she can quickly stop through the grocery drive-thru and acquire her item without having to make a huge ordeal out of it. The manner in which it will generate money is through more volume. The faster the service, the more customers one can tend to.

Venture Concept

The customers that this service targets are busy individuals who are in need of more fast service for their everyday needs and chores. Combining a chore that generally takes an hour or so to complete with a drive thru lane will cut these times by 90%. There will be no additional charge for using the drive thru service, and because many people will choose convenience over leisure, the service will essentially sell itself.

1.     Customers who are using mobile order and pick-up options still have to pre-order their food and wait (roughly 2 hours) before all their items are collected. If a customer needs this item immediately, this kind of service does not help them. For that reason, if a customer is in need of an item quickly, they will opt to go through the drive-thru where they can get their item in less than 5 minutes. Having explained this suggests that the switch will not be a problem. In fact, customers will be eager to have their needs met.

2.     Like mentioned in bullet 1, the competitors of this service are mobile-order and pick-up services and grocery delivery services. The weakness of both of these services is the length of time they take in order to get the products to their customers. Another weakness of delivery service is that it costs additional money, something many people rather not do if they can simply go get the groceries themselves.

3.     High-tech machinery and IT maintenance will be one of the most important factors in this operation.

Three minor elements

The secret sauce for my service will be the highly advance technology taking over the business. Investing once in high-tech machinery that will do the job of many people will eventually pay for itself and allow the company to profit more and longer. I would like to incorporate drive-thru mobile order pick up as an addition to this service. Customers will be able to schedule when they will pick up their mobile orders so that by the time they are at the drive-thru, this order is already pre-made and ready to be loaded in a vehicle. I would love for this operation to take a life of its own and become the new norm. It would be cool to see other grocery stores, such as Publix, come to my company and ask for a partnership in he service.